Posted at 8:46 am by Lee Lessack
Review by John Hoglund in CABARET SCENES
D.C. Anderson, a versatile, award-winning singer/songwriter, has a full-time career as a working actor with an impressive résumé including THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, MARTIN GUERRE, PIPPIN and work with the Guthrie and Steppenwolf Theater companies. He has received a Bistro Award for singer/songwriter, multiple MAC Award nominations for male vocalist and song of the year and has recently been co-starring in the Broadway-bound ANNE OF GREEN GABLES at Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut.
Anderson is a highly skilled interpretive singer who is able to make every word seem as if he were singing it right to the listener in the most intimate way. Isn’t that what great singing is all about? On HOUSE CONCERT, he weaves together 11 tracks that possess an emotional depth that is both profound and sincere. This is especially so in a slowed down reading of the album’s first cut, a perfectly phrased “Some Enchanted Evening” (Rodgers & Hammerstein). On “I Wanna Know You” from ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, with lyrics by Matte O’Brien and music by Matt Vinson, his delivery is riveting: “I want to know everything that you are, everything that you’ve been, everything you’ll be.”
His tone is flawless on his original lyric for “There Ain’t No Devil” (music by Bryce Kulak). In this haunting beauty, he intelligently caresses words without frills: “there ain’t no devil; only what’s been forgot/myths don’t die, the heart won’t lie/the deepest wish of the broken dish is the pieces find each other – when the one who broke it is gone, long gone.” It’s powerful. His original (co-written with his sister Claudia Anderson)“Song for Artists” is a tribute to artists everywhere:“This is my song to artists of all nations/borne of your love and dreams for all mankind.” He wraps it all up with the serene beauty of “Bright Angel” by Susan Osborn; …pensive and wistful “take my remains where the wild river runs and scatter them there in the dry desert air where the bright angel falls.”HOUSE CONCERT repeatedly underscores D.C. Anderson as an adept interpreter of the human heart, making it worthy of wide exposure.
Posted at 8:36 am by Lee Lessack
Find a quiet corner of your home.
Make a nest.
Listen through this album.
Experience love: anticipated, discovered, aligned, feared, challenged, accepted, denied, renewed, trusted. accepted.
D.C. Anderson’s voice possesses its usual tender exuberance. On this, following a dozen plus albums over a period of thirty years, nature has gifted it a resonant maturity – willing to go wherever the story takes it.
David Robison is at the piano. If you’ve seen him play, he appears to become a piano’s playful and necessary appendage. He is masterful here.
D.C.’s musical collaborator in years past, Lem Jay Ignacio, returns (along with son, Lemy) for Cole Porter’s ‘You Do Something to Me’. In the context of ‘sharing the night with darkness’, it might be considered the musical equivalent of a ‘dream sequence’.
Luke Wygodny (of the tremendous folk group THE HEARTSTRINGS PROJECT) composed two, and adds acoustic guitar to three, tracks. Audrey Q. Snyder adds her delicious cello to a few songs as well.
Songwriters collaborating with or covered by D.C. here are veteran tunesmiths Robert Sprayberry, Michele Brourman, Bryce Kulak, Steven Landau, Harry Chapin, Teresa Tudury, Luke Wygodny, Andrew Ratshin, Dick Gibbons and Bob Dylan.
Spend an afternoon with ‘sharing the night with darkness’ and discover why Stephen Mosher, of Broadway World described D.C.‘s voice (reviewing his 2022 LML MUSIC release HOUSE CONCERT) as ‘lovely, emotionally invested, articulate’ and D.C. in performance as ‘tender, theatrical and visceral’ with a ‘fine focus on the art of storytelling.’!
Posted at 12:45 pm by Lee Lessack
STILL WITHIN THE SOUND OF MY VOICE: THE SONGS OF LINDA RONSTADT, is the studio recording of the award winning concert created by Broadway veteran Elizabeth Ward Land (AMAZING GRACE, MEMPHIS, THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL). Touching on genres ranging from rock, country, folk, big band and mariachi, Elizabeth Ward Land finds her perfect vocal match in this salute to the great Linda Ronstadt. With gorgeous arrangements and soaring vocals in songs from the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers vast catalogue, including YOU’RE NO GOOD, BLUE BAYOU, FRENESI, and LONG, LONG TIME, the album promises something for every music lover.
Posted at 11:23 am by Lee Lessack
SARASOTA, D.C. Anderson’s twelfth recording – his eighth for LML MUSIC, finds D.C. in a playful mood with original parodies of Charles Chaplin’s ‘Smile’ titled ‘Frown’, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s ‘Johnny One Note’ skewering today’s ‘riff’ happy songsters titled ‘Jack the Riffer’ and his musical suggestion that Dolly Parton may have wanted to focus her displeasure on her husband ‘Carl Dean’ before begging ‘Jolene’ not to take her man (rendered on SARASOTA by Madalyn McHugh). New light hearted songs co-written with Chicago’s Elizabeth Doyle give suggestions to actors dreading the night sweats during rehearsals – ‘Actor’s Prayer’ and to the partner of a lover who cannot seem to give voice to ‘I love you’ – ‘Buy Me Something’. D.C.’s sister, Claudia, has written beautiful melodies to the ballads ‘Some Big Love’ and ‘You’re Lucky’. ANNE OF GREEN GABLES’ composer Matt Vinson has partnered with D.C. in a musical reaction to the POTUS, boasting of greeting refugees of repressive/unsupportive governments with ‘Beautiful Barbed Wire’. A collaboration with Robert Sprayberry produced the haunting, ‘Ever the Broken Wing’. Equally pensive is Andre Catrini’s first co-write with D.C. titled ‘Nothing of Us’.
As is often the case, D.C.’s love of the Great American Songbook is reflected in his recordings of Thelonious Monk’s ‘Round Midnight’, Gaskill and McHugh’s ‘I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me’, Andre, Schwandt and Kahn’s ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’, Burke and Van Heusen’s ‘But Beautiful’ and a song made famous by his daughter, Ricki Lee Jones is Richard Loris Jones’ ‘The Moon is Made of Gold’.
